Jj is for Jottings 128. Hard and Soft ‘C’ and ‘G’.
The great thing about spelling rules – such as the bossy ‘e’ rule – is that, once you learn a particular rule, you can read (and hopefully spell) many different words. In other words, rules give you lots of bang for your buck. When dealing with hard and soft ‘c’ and ‘g’, we teach the hard sound first as part of basic sound-letter links, and introduce the soft sounds a little later. Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 126. The Bossy ‘E’.
The bossy ‘e’ (sometimes called the magic ‘e’) appears so often in written language that it is worth revisiting in its own right. It is a classic case of “Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Once you know the rule, you can unlock thousands of words. Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 106. Strategies to Encourage Listening to Sounds in Words.
In the previous article I said that I would discuss general strategies to encourage listening to sounds in words, rather than visualising them. As I said, I have found no hard and fast rules, but these types of activities are helpful.
Shanti is coming to tell us all about strategies to encourage listening to sounds in words.
Jj is for Jottings 94. Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness and Phonics.
Learning phonics with this book helps with phonemic awareness and phonological awareness skills, too.
You may have heard the terms “phonological awareness”, “phonemic awareness” and “phonics” and wondered what they mean and whether they are different terms for the same thing. Let’s sort this out right now.
This is sound-letter links – i.e. learning which sound is made by each letter of the alphabet, and other sounds which are made by combining 2 or more letters. Children develop the concept that there are consistent relationships between letter symbols and sounds. This book is a great way to learn sound-letter links. But you need to make sure you are saying sounds rather than letter names. You can find this on the video. Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 85. Short and Long Vowels.
Since we were on the subject of vowels (see Auditory Discrimination of Vowel Sounds and Vowel Discrimination Activities), it occurred to me that you may have heard of short and long vowels and not know what they are. You would think that a long vowel is a longer version of a short vowel, but they are completely different sounds. Quite simply, short vowels are the sounds made by /a,e,i,o,u/, and long vowels are the names of those five letters.
Short and long vowels? Who cares? I’d rather have a zzzzz.
The easiest short vowel words are 3-letter CVC words eg. bag, beg, big, bog, bug. In each case we pronounce the vowel as its basic sound. When syllables end in a vowel and then a consonant (as in the examples above), the vowel is usually short. If there is more than one consonant, the vowel is almost always short, eg. “back, stopped”.
There are several ways of making long vowels.
Remember that this is English, and there are almost invariably exceptions.
Short and long vowels aren’t the only vowel sounds, and the other vowels will be discussed next time.
Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas.
Jj is for Jottings 84. Vowel Discrimination Activities.
Vowel Discrimination Activity 3. Identifying /i/ and /e/.
As promised in the previous article, here are some vowel discrimination activities to help your child to hear the difference between vowel sounds, in particular the tricky pairs of a/u and i/e. At the same time these activities reinforce the sound-letter links for the vowels. After all, it’s not much use for reading and spelling if you can hear the difference between them but don’t know which letter belongs to the sound. Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 81. Analysing Sounds.
Henry is learning sounds the fun way with “Aa is for Alpacas” and the help of his grandmother, Ann.
Analysing sounds in reading is really the opposite of blending sounds (see here and here for discussion and exercises in sound blending.) Analysing sounds is simply breaking words into their component sounds (whereas blending sounds is joining the sounds up to make words). The progression is: listening for and isolating sounds at the beginning of a word, then at the end, and finally the vowel in the middle (assuming it is a consonant-vowel-consonant [CVC] word). It is even better to begin with 2-sound CV words, to make it as easy as possible in the early stages.
If I had a dollar for every time I have said: “What sound can you hear at the start/end of – ?” and the child says the letter name, then I’d be really quite wealthy. What you need to do then is to use the letter name instead of the sound in the given word to prove that it doesn’t work. Eg. When a child says that the first sound in “dog” is dee, the response should be along the lines of, “That would be “deeog”. You said the name of the letter, not the sound that you can hear. /d-o-g/ makes ‘dog’”. You also need to encourage them to feel the sound in their mouth.
Of course, if children know the name and sound of each letter of the alphabet, they are far more likely to correctly give you the sound rather than the letter name when analysing or blending words. This is where Aa is for Alpacas comes in as the means of teaching this with least effort. The final goal is to have the alphabet clearly written/printed out in front of the child: Point randomly to letters and say “name” or “sound” and, when the child responds correctly 100% of the time, they really know their sounds and letter names.
Tune in next time for activities to assist children to analyse sounds in words.
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Jj is for Jottings 65. What Is Synthetic Phonics?
We’re just taking a break from the series on How to Raise a Reader – we’ll finish it next time.
Synthetic phonics means “building words from individual sounds”. For example, even if you had never seen it before, you could spell the word “step” Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 59. More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.
I was reminded a couple of days ago that there is more to say on the subject of minimal pairs ( see Jj is for Jottings 47. Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless. You may wish to read/re-read this before continuing), when an intelligent, well-educated adult fell into a common trap – thinking that the letter s (frequently a plural at the end of a word, but sometimes in the middle) is always pronounced as /s/, whereas in fact it is often pronounced as /z/. Continue reading
Jj is for Jottings 48. One Letter Doesn’t Always Equal One Sound.
If you have read “Aa is for Alpacas” you will already know this, but just in case you haven’t… the letter x is actually two sounds /ks/. (Remember that the slashes mean the sound rather than the letter name/s.) The other thing you will know Continue reading
